User:Reversedragon/UTDR/pointed-tail/v2

The forgotten man

(RedactedTale AU / Deltarune adaptation)

This is my interpretation of what is happening in Deltarune. At times, I chose to ignore certain lore contradictions and make it deliberately depart from the games, usually because there was no good "real answer" on something or because I thought the answer I came up with was funnier. I tried not to do this at times that I believed to be "important". Sometimes my concept of what was "important" was motivated by trying to line up the story with the original premise that kicked all this theorizing off, which is best summarized as "What if Undertale explained the Memoryheads the way it explained Flowey?". With that cleared up, here's the story of Deltarune presented as the backstory of my unofficial "Undertale route". Yes, the entire story, up through Chapter 7.

Dess

Our story begins in a small northeastern town named Hometown... or at least it would if a certain family of icy deer-people were honest with themselves. All the way over in a satellite city named Furtherville, one December Holiday has quietly escaped the dreary clutches of Hometown in order to see the world one suburban mess at a time. She is at least thirteen years old — small enough that her absence might bring some concern, but old enough to have turned notably rebellious and become a pain. Usually known as "Dess", she has always been drawn to sports, danger, and loud ways of expressing herself, never to be confined by any particular box of what anyone else takes "woman" or "girl" to be.

As Dess wanders through Furtherville, she stumbles onto a particularly strange human child crouching at the edge of a wooded area eating moss (Kris). This child has an unnatural way of moving, shuffling or shambling from place to place such that when they stand on any particular spot half the time they seem to be standing at an oblique angle to reality. She has never seen anything alive that looked more like a cryptid.

Undeterred, Dess steps out into the light. At the sight of a big assertive shadow with antlers towering out of the bushes from who knows where, the cryptid child jumps.

Dess: Ooh. Afraid of me, huh. [raises hands and makes grizzly claws] Yes, I'm a Monster, we eat human Souls. [Kris tilts their head upward, definitely not scared now, but intrigued.] Dess: [arms deflate to sides; impressed] Oh. You're a tough one, aren't you. Dess: I have some money. You want a pizza? [Kris perks up.]

Dess has brought the mysterious cryptid child to eat some pizza, which they gobble down, when she gets a call from her mother asking where on earth she is.

Dess: Everything's fine, mom. I am getting pizza, just like I said. Dess: But uh... I found this weird homeless human. So... can you come pick us up in Furtherville? I know this kid just needs a home. I'm fine. [frowns] ...What I worry about is whether they are.

Dess and the mysterious human child return to Hometown. Carol, town mayor and stodgy, wrinkle-faced cold front of a woman who seems to blast rooms with a cloud of icy mist by walking in, has mixed feelings about this event. She could be angry about this. She could go off about what a terrible lapse of judgement this was. But she's not. This time she can't. In a town where at least a few people find her uncaring and almost oppressive, and where she hardly has time for anyone, anything that reflects positively on her family is something she can only defeatedly embrace, and seeing her child show concern and generosity toward somebody else, her otherwise annoying headstrong child, has simply drained all the anger out of her. For the next week or so she will take this event in stride and try to pretend like she always meant for it to happen. Sure, December doing nice things for her communities, I always encouraged that — what I wondered is how long it would take for her to finally come around. Dess, if you want to help people, what you should really do is...... She will repeatedly try hinting, unsubtly, at various things which would surely reflect well on Dess but which Dess will probably have no interest in doing. But for now, the most important thing is simply that they made it back safely, and that they find the human child a home. A home somewhere which isn't here.

A frighteningly few seconds after expressing her relief the incident "turned out well", Carol turns around and says there is no way their house has space for another child and they will have to "get it out of here" as though Kris were just a thing (with an implied "as soon as possible"). Dess and her sister glance at each other. Not only did their mother specifically choose to phrase things in one of the least inviting ways possible, but they both know this is a very strange thing to say when they live in the single biggest residential building in town. Their mom clearly does not like this shambling human kid or want them around here.

To be fair, when Dess' sister Noelle — who is far younger than her — first caught sight of the strange bedraggled forest human, she did get a bit spooked for a moment, but that wasn't really a matter of running into the town's first human child as much as a matter of Kris silently standing off-kilter in the hallway like some sort of liminal demon. But to Noelle that wasn't even all that bad after the first couple of times it happened. She'd always found spooky things fascinating. So it wouldn't take long for Noelle to line up beside Dess and begin conspiring together on how they could make sure their new friend wouldn't actually have to leave. With input from her sister on what would make a truly eye-catching ad, Dess puts up ads in a few places including the school. Being a teacher at the school, it isn't long before Toriel sees the ad, and will be following its suggestion to offer the human a pie. Toriel, Asgore, and Asriel all seem to warm up to the human child quickly once they have met.

But the time leading up to that feels like forever. As Kris is still living in the shadows of the Holiday mansion, having to bear the knowledge that the second known place they've been clearly doesn't want them, Dess catches them in a particular mood of being generally "down". Restless. Frowning. Not engaging with much of anything. Seeming to almost blend into the shadows as if bending away from reality. As much as Kris has generally been an off-kilter hall demon, this is not their happy "I'm a spooky ghost" face; this is the life and vigor actually draining out of them a bit.

Dess quietly collects Kris back into their guest room, pulls them to her heart, and hugs them.

Dess: [messes Kris' hair] Don't you have such a downtrodden face, you little apparition. Dess: I'll make sure you have somewhere to live. You won't have to leave here. You'll be across the street somewhere. Dess: I'm not going anywhere. Even if you can't see me every day, I'll always be here.

[Dess ponders. Even as Kris looks a little calmer everything is still. It's still a little dreary around here. After a little silence, she gently claps Kris on the shoulder and sings a single spontaneous lyric:] Dess: Don't forget, I'm with you in the dark [Kris looks a bit confused.] Dess: I can write you a song. But I'll have to get the guitar.

[Dess comes back with the guitar, and the two start attempting to turn the lyric into a song.] Dess: When the... Kris: —light is running low Dess: And the cold begins to grow Kris: [puzzled] Cold doesn't grow. Dess: ...You're right. Dess: When the light is running low / And the shadows start to grow / And - everything you knew seems like fantasy, [Dess thinks a moment] Dess: [pointing to Kris] There's a light inside of you Dess: [running out of ideas] ...If you only knew [Dess sings the first "freedom motif" without words] Dess: Don't forget, I'm with you in the dark Kris: [contemplative] ...Needs some work. Dess: Yeah.

Over the next couple of days the two finish the song together. (Or at least, they finish it to the extent we see it in Deltarune trailers. Being so short, perhaps it's still technically unfinished.)

Neither Noelle nor Carol really understands what's going on because all they see is Dess and the demon child messing around making a bit of noise and looking like they're having entirely too much fun with this. But that's okay, because it still means a lot to the two of them. At the end of it, Dess scrawls out a music sheet for Kris, just the notes, and hands it to them to put inside their small pile of things they've brought from Furtherville — a hardcover book from who knows where, a weird newspaper with certain areas accented in red, and a couple things pressed into the book? There's no particular reason any of these things should be special enough to bring along unless they were some kind of... bundle of memories. Sure enough, without Dess having to say or ask anything about it, Kris casually stows the music sheet inside the book and wraps it in the newspaper.

Dess: [handing Kris music sheet] I don't know if you can play it, but there you go, it's yours.

The joke will be on her when Kris becomes really good at the piano in a few years and has played this thing many many times as well as several highly elaborate variations of it. (If you look closely enough, you'll see that "Piano that may not be played well" is simply an extended version of the two ending "freedom motif" lines in "Don't Forget". As you can now see, the otherwise-ironic title of this song is actually in reference to what Dess said before Kris learned to play the piano.) When Kris just needs to let off some energy, they will be coming to the Holiday house and playing various tunes on the piano. If one thing's for sure, this music sheet has been burned into Kris' very being, and there is more or less nothing that could make them forget it.

Noelle

Time passes. As Kris becomes a member of the Dreemurr family, Kris, Toriel, and Asgore save back one of Dess' ads as a funny little memory. Kris, Noelle, and Dess become good friends. The three children get into various misadventures. Carol is internally bothered that Dess never seems to straighten up and just gradually gets into more trouble over time even if the trouble is rarely big. She ends up being lenient on Dess and taking out her anger on Kris, Noelle, and Kris' new older brother Asriel. After all Dess has done to find Kris a home and hold the group of friends together, really extending more love to Kris and Noelle than their parents in a way, Carol just can't bring herself to ever be seriously harsh on Dess, and everybody else gets to suffer for it. Does she hate Asriel? No. But if pinning Asriel between Toriel's rules and her own rules can teach Dess a lesson about the consequences of not getting along with other people's parents, then that's the method she'll use.

When the children are not getting into trouble, they are often playing imagination games in various places, especially Kris' house. Kris invents a game of creating scenarios out of the most arbitrary objects. Out of the collection of things they brought from Furtherville, Kris takes the newspaper and folds it to a bit bigger than the size of a book, then sets the book for pressing things on it, and the cat wizard Seam (pronounced Shawm) on top of that. Inspired by a couple weird, poetic phrases from the newspaper, they say that this is the tale of how "the old world will end" after a great unstoppable "crisis" — this story is true whenever they put this particular altar of found objects in the room. Noelle remarks that the premise is "a little dark". Kris points to the red-monochrome picture of a phoenix monster barely visible below the edge of the book and notes that when phoenix monsters are delivering this prophecy, it's not all gloomy and the world can probably rebuild itself; maybe if everyone is nice and favors making friends over killing each other, the outcome would be more favorable. Kris stands the green crayon next to the book and Seam (pronounced Shawm) and starts voicing these ideas through it like a smaller friendly wizard who is a local expert on the Prophecy. Noelle finds this pretty funny, confused why there are two wizards. Kris is full of explanations for everything as long as they are always too terse to actually make things any clearer. They have always had a particular habit of playing pranks on Noelle, though generally good-natured ones.

Kris and Noelle play cards near the altar, they make up storylines about "the demise of kings and queens", the newspaper once again at fault for some very fancy poetry. Noelle makes horror stories out of things that shouldn't be frightening, like the wall plugs. They have quite a time with their various games. But, of course, all things have to end sooner or later.

One day Kris and Noelle spot a strange crack running through the earth like some kind of long thin wire, or pointed tail. Out of curiosity, they follow it out across the outskirts of Hometown just to see what kind of abnormal lake or river mouth lives at the head of this thing. Noelle remarks that she would hate to see the mouse or cat this was attached to. The pointed tail extends for quite some distance before ever widening out. As they follow it deeper and deeper to its source, they finally see it begin to widen into a gap no bigger around than a baseball, containing no visible dirt or rock but instead a total pitch-black darkness from the tiniest milimeter over the edge. Without thinking about it too much, Kris reaches down and pokes just a couple fingers in. Their hand comes out safely, but nothing that goes into this hole is the least bit visible.

Shortly, Dess catches up to them. She is about to tease them lightly for going somewhere dangerous in her own unique tone that implies her problem with this is more that they left her out of the fun. But then she sees what they're looking at. She kneels down next to the crack and begins messing with it, tapping one side of it with her fist to see what will happen. The ground tears and frays as if it were made of some kind of sturdy paperboard. She starts peeling away bits of terrain on the other side of the crack to confirm it. It would seem that in this particular part of the world, the earth is simply a thin sheet which is cracking and peeling away to leave an endless black void. Dess tears a significant chunk off the other side to reveal what vaguely resembles a faint night sky filled with glints of light. Kris and Noelle's expressions have gone from intrigued to a little scared. Then, very abruptly, the terrain where Dess is standing caves in and she disappears into the darkness without a trace. No sight of her. No sound. She is gone.

Kris and Noelle are both terrified. Noelle runs the other direction as fast as she can. Kris hesitates at the edge for just a few seconds that seem like they are expanding out to half an hour. They feel as if there is some unknown action that if they don't take within the next few seconds they will never have the opportunity to take again. They feel like they deserve to be hurled into this pit and destroyed even if nothing ever comes back out of it. They have no idea whatsoever how they might pull Dess back out. They know she fell in way too fast to be able to reach in and catch her. They stick their arm in anyway. They find nothing. It feels utterly empty. Kris turns around and walks home. They feel sick. They feel like by messing with the crack they just killed the one person that really cared about them. Maybe from the beginning they've been nothing but trouble. Having to be rescued by Dess. Taking up space in Carol's house. Those days where they frightened Noelle. Killing Dess. Nobody should like them now. Nobody should be willing to raise this and put up with this.

Ever since Kris had been rescued, they always looked up to Dess. Failing to save her, leading her into the void. What had they done?

When Kris and Noelle come back alone, Carol looks at them with narrowed eyes. She knows Dess did something forbidden and is not happy about that, but once again, has to take it out on the children. Especially with Carol bearing down on them they are both too afraid to be able to articulate what happened and all they can really do is choke out "dark" and point an arm in the right direction.

Carol goes and investigates the rift, and sees that the problem is very much not normal. She ponders what to do. Her top concern is still her own image. Shortly, she brings in some contractors from another town to build a shelter that encloses the center chasm, and fill in the thinner cracks with rocks, dirt, and grass seed that for some mysterious reason seem to patch up the cracks entirely and not fall in any deeper. She puts an announcement in the paper that Asgore is fired as chief of police, although this is really just a lie. Secretly, she is forming a task force with him to investigate the shelter. The contractors built a tunnel into the heart of the chasm, which surprisingly did have a bottom after all. At the bottom of the chasm would be a strange and eerie world built from a darkness beyond darkness. The few people in town that have any idea about any of this are told to never talk about it, and act as if the original chasm never existed.

The town takes on a deep emotional sickness. Kris has trouble facing Noelle directly. Noelle comes to think of Kris as the beginning of Dess disappearing. She doesn't dislike Kris in any way, but she can't stop thinking of the correlation between Kris originally appearing and losing her sister. Kris can just barely bring themself to come to Noelle's house and play the piano, seemingly mashing out strange jumbles of chords to cover up the melody, trying to channel what it was like for Dess to be there without focusing on her. The fact the two were playing games about the world ending in darkness before the world actually did break apart into darkness makes them uneasy whenever they think about anything they did before. Kris fears the day that Noelle will turn around on them and snap at them for being such a "heartless murderer". Eventually they realize that pushing through this simply isn't going to make things better, and they stop coming to Noelle's house at all.

Over time all of Kris' memories begin to become slightly poisoned. The altar of memory-objects and the games in the classroom all feel like they secretly hide the concept of Kris being a murderer and Noelle or Carol or Dess somehow bursting up out of the depths of the earth and turning into terrifying abominations that will end Kris and end everything. Kris moves some old things from their house to the classroom. This process is loosely connected to why their room is so empty in-game, although it's not the exact same set of things; as they clear some things out, they don't have the heart to put other things in.

Noelle continues to look everywhere for signs that Dess is still alive — that she maybe got out of the darkness somehow, maybe she wandered through the tunnel and turned up in some other town. Dess had shown interest in the idea of getting out of this town multiple times, so maybe this had weirdly become part of her plan somehow. She keeps doing web searches for "December Holiday". She looks through her spam emails, mostly out of boredom, but also in the back of her mind feeling like it's just true that ads are the connection between someone looking for someone else, and ads can help people. Kris, as much as they cannot say it out loud, "knows" that Dess will not come back and could only have died that day.

When Toriel learns that Asgore has been fired from the police force for "failing to find the missing girl" it tips her over the edge. She starts to notice absolutely everything bad about Asgore more. The worst thing is that she knows he is lying to her about something. He is clearly meeting with Carol for some reason. He's "running a flower shop" but he doesn't put any real effort into it. He's going off somewhere every week "to get flowers", but he never actually ends up stocking any new kinds of flowers. Is he secretly dating Carol? Is he secretly dating Carol's husband Rudy? She has no idea what's going on and by now she almost doesn't want to know. Toriel and Asgore get divorced. The Dreemurr and Holiday families increasingly destabilize. A few other people across town seem to be getting spiteful at each other too. Everything seems to get gradually worse. The silence and the act of keeping things in wears on everyone.

Then one day, one fateful day in the future, an armored figure of featureless void appears and begins piercing geysers of darkness out of the earth — the Roaring Knight. Every time one of these Dark Fountains opens, a room elaborates itself into a fantasy landscape made of the sum of people's thoughts, and all the objects come to life. As Kris sees this happening, they do not want to look at it. The figure seems to be taunting them. Daring them to stop it before the Dark Fountain expands over enough of an area that the contents of their mind and their memories will be shown to everyone. Kris is already tired of the Roaring Knight and wants them to go away. Noelle looks at the shadowy figure and sees something familiar. Those antlers... She is convinced this thing will somehow lead them to her lost sister.

Carol rounds up Kris and tells them they have to promise to go into the void, and bring back her daughter. This isn't one of her "bad days" of snapping at them. It's more that she actually wants to believe there is nothing wrong with Kris and the whole thing around Kris' fear of harming her family that she doesn't quite know or understand can be forgiven. That, and she needs more heads on her task force. In all these years Asgore has not really been all that effective, and now that Kris is becoming a teenager she's wondering if they might be able to do this better.

Carol: You made a promise, didn't you? Carol: [attempts to sing, sounds like an out-of-touch old person] "Don't forget, I'm with you in the dark". [Kris looks disconcerted, but mostly because of the fact she actually remembered it exactly.]

The forgotten man

Some time between the moment the Roaring Knight broke through the calm and the moment Kris first went home from the incident... there was a time in-between.

As Kris was drifting apart from Noelle, and... the person they hardly dared to name or think about... they had begun obsessively drawing very specific kinds of things. It was suddenly all about the idea of "mystery people". They had this need to create characters that were dark and unknown. Characters that were mysterious were surely likely to be more powerful. Who knew what secret powers they had lurking under the surface? It just made sense. You can hardly make a superhero story without first making a character that's mysterious to people. But when the audience gets to see their secret, the hero becomes vindicated that having secrets isn't actually a bad thing.

Superheroes were cool enough. But what's better than a superhero? What's the best possible superhero? Wouldn't it be a character that everyone knows almost nothing about? How many powers could a character like that be hiding? He vanished from reality one day. Everyone reveres him. They're almost not sure how much he even accomplished. He could have accomplished everything. He could have created their whole world. He could practically be a god. But nobody truly knows. They don't know why he disappeared. They don't even know exactly how. Maybe he disappeared from their reality to go create another reality. A new world that would be even better. Maybe he could change the future. Maybe he could rewrite time. Or maybe it was actually better he disappeared, because running into him would be terrifying. Nobody really knew how much he was capable of. If they knew, it would break the mystery man's power. Not that you could weaken anybody with so much space to hide secret powers. But, you know. Maybe he could only be at his most powerful quietly manipulating everything about the two worlds if nobody ever found him.

This is the way it was every other day. Mystery this, mystery that. Sometimes the mystery character would just open their coat and pull out a knife. Sometimes the character had the ability to control every sand dune. It was far less important to draw well than to just keep making more drawings containing new mysteries and new adventures.

They lost interest in really "playing" the piano. All they could bring themself to do was throw together distinctly "mysterious" jingles of just a few clusters of notes repeating over and over. One of the themes overtook the other few, and they just began playing almost nothing but variations of it. Sometimes they were doodling these two bars of ascending and descending eighth notes on blank pieces of paper, or napkins. It was a relief just to draw something familiar, even if it was nothing more than empty placeholder music.

Although the palette of things Kris drew became more focused, it was less an erosion and more an evolution. Each of the previous mystery characters had been played out and served their purpose. [*g] So now they became more concentrated on trying to sketch the mystery man himself. They felt like this was forbidden in some unclear way. As if anybody were to see the sketches, there would be consequences. They drew only lightly, and every time redacted the sketches by scribbling over them with a green crayon. Each time they would only be able to glimpse a small bit of the mystery man before the drawing became disorganized, rarely stopping on the same feature twice. One day they instead drew an impression of their neighbor's mysterious brother they had never seen come out of the house but had become convinced must be really cool. But the mystery man had to be in that picture too, like some kind of abstract seal of approval; "great minds think alike".

At some point Toriel started to pick up on this whole pattern of repetitive behaviors and sent Kris to a therapist. The therapist managed to get Kris to go to an art therapy session and start trying to draw the mystery man entirely. But for some reason they couldn't bring themself to go there. The pencil went around wildly, every error covering up the others, and they ended up with one big bunch of scribbles. They then started to cover it up with an elaborate stylized tree. It was better this way. Their mysteries phase was a little stupid now that they thought about it. Maybe it was better to focus on the act of forgetting and making new memories, and leaving the past behind.

Memoryhead

Near the end of Undertale, Asgore's royal scientist Alphys accidentally leaves open the entrance to a hidden basement lab. The place is dark, dingy, creepy, and worst of all, way off in the corner the faucets leak something no faucet should ever be dripping. A melty skeletal head with six faces which can whisper through phones the option to "join" it and hand people "Bad Memories". There is never any explanation in Undertale of what this thing is. This is the Memoryhead's story.

The time Kris spent in Furtherville before meeting Dess wasn't very long. Kris, little did anyone know, had miraculously spawned into the world out of nothing at approximately six years old. Having no family, they were left to simply wander around the town eating and collecting whatever they could find.

In the process, there are about six people they run into a bit more often than others or that caught their eye as especially striking that they simply start observing.

One of these memories begins at the Furtherville library. Kris finds a book sitting around which is about some lion that goes into a wardrobe and finds a weird hidden civilization of humans that shortly try to lead him into senseless human wars. They are lukewarm about this book, but will end up reading through it anyway out of the crushing dread of being alone and not having anything in particular to do. Too young and new to this world to really be very clear on what a library is, they simply take the book with them, and the beeper happens to not go off because in actuality it wasn't a library book, and just a book somebody brought to a library, now unfortunately "misplaced". While at the library they see a Torosaurus-shaped skeleton monster go by with a cart of books squinting at a particular old, weathered one and inaudibly murmuring something about where to shelf it. They also see some kind of curved blue bird monster heading to the second floor, who never says anything but who they presume to like the books upstairs. When "the tragedy" would happen, this Torosaurus-shaped monster would spawn into the RedactedTale world as the Underground's first librarian who once took much better care of things, Antiqua. (In the RedactedTale world this character is wholesale just a four-legged dinosaur. In the Deltarune world they stand up diagonally like a theropod, walking around horizontal but able to tilt their body up to see over a counter.)

Another of these people is an older man, a fuzzy bluish creature with characteristics of both bats and birds or possibly dragons if you squint. (These monsters are called "birbats" and they include in their ranks Berdly, Snowdrake, and Martlet if we are taking Undertale Yellow to be somewhat continuous with Undertale and RedactedTale.) He is distinctly short, smaller than most people in the town, but spry. He seems to like to go on hikes but also to stop and take a rest on a bench reading odd books about spirituality and expanding your mind, or sometimes just the newspaper. One day, he accidentally left a slice of quiche under a bench while deciding to go to a store, which stayed there into the evening. Kris ate it. Another day he dropped a packet of fresh sage. It was a bit strange how despite being in such good physical form and willing to improve himself he was so prone to dropping things. To remember his gifts, Kris would press one dried sage leaf into their book between paper, like you'd press a flower. When "the tragedy" would transpire, he would spawn into the RedactedTale world as the one mythical sage hidden in a cloud of common annoying birbats, Sage.

One day Kris would be witness to an inexplicable gathering of protestors standing around a table full of newspapers and pamphlets with a big sign next to it saying "End sanctions now". Kris hasn't the slightest idea what the sanctions could be on, or even what sanctions actually are for that matter. They get closer to the table in order to see if they can get any more information about what's happening here. One of the three small phoenix monsters perched on the table tosses them a newspaper. It would appear that this particular activist group has been having a lot of trouble getting the word out, to the point they are desperate enough to hand their weird red-accented newspapers to children. The phoenixes try to announce to Kris exactly what important world event all of this is about, but all of it is still going totally over their head — the elemental birds' odd dialect similar to a London accent put through a garbage disposal not being the main reason, but probably not helping. When "the tragedy" would take place, the three phoenixes would spawn into the RedactedTale world as the three great Communist theorists Ellwing, Ellshriek, and Ellsburn, also known as "The Three Ells". (These aren't their actual names in Deltarune. Kris just saw something about "three greats" in their newspaper and assumed it "had" to be referring to them.)

(There are supposed to be three more people, but as of now they didn't get finished before the first RedactedTale post got scrapped and restarted. The basic idea is that these are monster types that didn't appear in Undertale. The fourth one is a dragon monster similar to Susie. So that leaves the last two probably belonging to Waterfall, or possibly one in Snowdin depending on where Sage lives.)

These six people, although seemingly random at first glance, would become etched into Kris' early memories, all embedded into the collection of things Kris brought with them from Furtherville into Hometown. This "Dark World creation altar" is the only trace of Kris' early memories of a world that December Holiday neither appeared in nor vanished from. Should the whole world of Deltarune become ripped apart into nothing, these fading traces of random people would be one of the only fragments of Deltarune that remained. But at the same time, this bundle of memories would also be capable of generating its own whole world where nothing was so bad. The key to this sat in the very center of the pile, with a single buried piece of music. The memory that would spawn the mythical seventh member of the memory pile — Asgore's forgotten royal scientist, W.D. Gaster.

The world of Undertale is an alternate version of the Deltarune world. The RedactedTale world is a ghostly image superimposed on Undertale telling an odd, dubious story of what happened "before" Undertale that doesn't seem to totally match up. (Think of it as booting up Undertale and finding a hidden route in the game.) The Deltarune world preceded both of them. Kris is one of the points of connection bridging the two worlds. And were Kris to vanish from the Deltarune world, falling over the edge, their hopes and memories would follow them in, never to be seen again.

Did you know that if you name yourself Kris in Undertale, every encounter with Flowey will be replaced with a Memoryhead? There's a good reason you didn't know that.

Sans

Over on another block, while some of the town's children have been going through despair, angst, and horrors beyond their own comprehension, other people have simply been going through the motions of their lives not entirely clear on what's been going on. Namely, Sans.

Sans runs Hometown's convenience store. He is a skeleton monster. He is annoying. He does not seem like he belongs in reality. When you think things are normal, and you feel like your day is going through without the feeling that anything is indescribably "off", you'll find that feeling shattered because Sans will just exist and be there. He's questionably funny. He's maddening. If you hear him speak you somehow just know that if his remarks could have a font they would be in lowercase Comic Sans. The things he says are exactly that bad. He's lazy -- or perhaps to be more accurate, uncooperative. He only sometimes shows up for things. And he will not be important in Deltarune. ...Not after one particular day.

For a while, Sans is just existing in Hometown. Running the store, watching TV sometimes, not really doing anything all that interesting. He's a bit lonely, and he's not entirely likeable as much as he secretly wishes he was.

Then this weird little gremlin child appears in Hometown, apparently found by the mayor's kid. Sans has something to smile about for a week or two, because he has someone new to annoy. But things settle down soon enough. Some days he vaguely catches sight of the big kid and the two small ones messing with each other and sneaking into everything they don't know about, probably having more fun than him when it comes down to it. Then the mayor's kid goes missing. He's not really clear on how that happened; it's not exactly a very Sans-like thing to go all the way to the pointed tail to actually get a look at it. Then a weird malaise seems to extend over the town. This is the moment he actually begins noticing things. Nothing is normal, and various people are growing apart from each other. Mostly the mayor and those fiery people a little ways over, but even some like the Cattenheimers and the crocs on the north side are getting angry at each other. He doesn't really know what to do about this. So more or less, he just tries to survive it.

Sans is one for humor. But he's not one for humor that makes any sense. He has been watching science documentaries because sitcoms aren't actually funny; somehow every strange little speech quirk or personality quirk of the consultants trying to explain black holes is much more interesting. Sometimes when he can't sleep the best way to feel better is to just watch a documentary about aliens and start laughing wildly at a slightly unusual name somebody has that is in no way actually funny. There is something uniquely magical about bad jokes. Good jokes lose their power quickly. But there is nothing funnier than the concept of something that is not funny being funny, because nobody expects that. Sans occasionally ponders the philosophical question of if things that initially aren't funny are the only things that can become funny. He doesn't know. All he knows is that the funniest possible thing would be somebody seeing that question out of context and not getting it.

Off to the side is a lamp he has decorated with blatantly fake facial features fixed to the pole. He's tied a red scarf around the lamp as a "gift to his brother". He falsely tells everyone he has a brother that doesn't feel like going outside. But little do they know, it's not entirely a lie. He doubts anyone else would find his creation amusing, but he's fine with that.

At one point, for unknown reasons, Sans starts having dreams that the lamp turned into a Darkner and became an actual interesting character. He dreams that he is living in a "situation drama" where various furniture objects and food items live in a town and work at a retail store, and it's structured a lot like a sitcom but it's in no way meant to be funny. It's more like a horror show; it's almost the same genre as Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. One day the lamp character looks like the room light; one day he looks more like a streetlight; one day he is stuck in the ceiling of the store and it's played for body horror. The lamp character is confident and often boldly getting into situations he's not prepared for, but sometimes younger characters look up to him, convinced he will protect them. One day Sans dreams the lamp character shattered into a million pieces, and wakes up quite disturbed. He looks, and his actual lamp only has a burnt-out bulb. Weird.

A few months from this, the demon child appears to Sans, knocking on his door. He opens the door to find he is being gifted a strange drawing of what looks vaguely like him and a taller confident skeleton with a red scarf. He studies it in confusion for a second before his mind matches the drawing up to the lamp character made from his "brother". He looks back up at the human in disbelief. The human smiles at him emptily, and then walks away. Sans looks back down at the picture. Off to the side of the two skeletons, shrunk a little ways away through perspective, there is an enigmatic green tree. The brother character is holding up a finger giving advice, and for some reason proclaiming "We're fine by ourselves" and in bigger print "Always forget!". He has no idea what to make of any of this. At least, not at the moment.

Sans calls up Toriel simply to inform her he's been gifted a strange drawing, and ask if she has any idea what's going on with it. Toriel notes that the human child did not come back. Sans gets a little nervous. You don't get a call back from Sans immediately, so by now this child has been away from home a concerningly long time. He calls the mayor's house to see if the human went there. The phone rings for a bit, and then Noelle picks up. As far as she can tell, the human child hasn't been to visit her for the past few weeks. Sans knows something is wrong. He calls the police, and tells them he wants help tracking down the human child. They give him the unexpected response that while they will go, the area he is talking about is off limits and he is not supposed to go there. When Sans hangs up, he only becomes more determined to actually find out what's going on.

Sans gets ready to leave. Then his phone rings again. He picks it up. A strange and unearthly voice informs him that it has already prepared him a ride. Sans: what, a ride to ufo jail? how much trouble am i in? Phone: NO. IT WILL TAKE YOU TO THE HUMAN INSTANTANEOUSLY. Phone: PLEASE KEEP IN MIND: YOU MUST NOT LET THE KNIGHT WIN.

A Dark Fountain bursts through the apparent reality of Sans' room, but instead of filling the room it simply solidifies into a brown door almost exactly like the doors already in his house. Blown away, with no real thoughts or words, he opens it.

As Sans steps through the door, he emerges right next to the human child. Over near the mysterious shelter that people only speak of occasionally, another great crack has emerged, darkness and stars peering out. The human stands on the edge of the fissure, clutching to their chest some strange pile of books and newspapers. They tip over the edge and begin to plummet in. Sans acts quickly and, one foot and one hand firmly in the doorframe, plunges in and catches them by the ankles. Far below is... a strange patch of grass and sparse pink flowers. The book pile falls to the bottom of the hole, never to be seen again. A single golden flower apparently from the edge of Hometown settles out of the pile. Then, the eight or so fallen objects become drained of color, and burble away into bubbles of grayish slime and into nothing.

Sans pulls the human out. As they fall back onto the grass, it becomes apparent they were turning grayscale as well. Color floods back into the human, though they are still lying on the grass looking bedraggled and drained as if they don't want to be here, or anywhere.

Sans scoops up the human carefully, never having been all that strong in the end but just barely able to lift a child, and slowly ports them back into the door. He sets the child down across his couch, and tries to phone Toriel. The mystery voice has a few more words for him first.

Phone: VERY GOOD. Phone: NOW, PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED. I HAVE GIVEN THE CHILD A PROTECTOR, AND THEY MAY ATTEMPT TO REMOVE IT.

Sans looks up from the phone. Seemingly personally offended by having to come back to life, Kris has weaponized the last of their strength to tear away a mysterious heart-shaped object, panting, holding it at arm's length. The color had left them briefly, but is slowly seeping back in as if due to blood circulation or something. A few drops of blood fall from the red heart onto their face, and greater blotches of color wash through them as each one hits, as if the heart were dropping some kind of reality paint. Shortly, they are entirely colored in despite having removed the red heart. They cast it onto the floor weakly, having no strength left.

Sans looks at the scene blankly. Sans: ...okay, so what do i do if they did? Phone: LEAVE IT. Phone: EACH TIME THEY LOSE THE PROTECTOR, THEY HAVE ONE DAY. Phone: I MUST GO NOW. I REPEAT: IGNORE THE KNIGHT. DO NOT LET THE KNIGHT WIN. Sans: okay. Sans: when i have any idea what a knight is, i'll definitely do that.

A bit later, Sans has decided to stay around at Toriel's house and check on the human. The human child is still sprawled across existence itself in the worst mood, looking utterly upset at the presence of everything from room lights to glasses of water. Sans, careful not to make too much noise and make any of this worse, gently sets the glowing red heart back onto Kris and lets it sink back into their body. They seem to have come to a point of accepting that nothing they do at this point will make anything less annoying and they're just going to have to take the Soul back and be angry.

Sans: well. i couldn't leave that by itself. Sans: if i did, i'd probably be getting a phone call about it. Sans: ...you know, from my brother. Sans: way over on the other side. ...of the county. Toriel: My. You have a surprising number of brothers. Sans: well. he's very busy right now.

Sans hasn't the slightest idea if the phone voice is his brother, or a relative at all.

Chara

Chara was not born.

Chara was caused. Chara was eventuated.

Chara was a being spawned out of the benthos of the universe, from the deepest darkest game-mechanical frameworks that made a picture into a lizard-person and a virtual "D20" into a meaningful event. Within the Deltarune universe, there is a particular process that can happen. As waves of despair and emotional darkness ripple through the world, the universe births a "destined hero" who will fulfill a prophecy. This destined hero spawns into a character customization screen, and receives a name. The character creation process defines all the characteristics of the item and smooths all of its manufacturing defects away. Were a destined hero to spawn in without going through the character creator, their behavior would be strange and their movements would be erratic and inhuman, the characteristic biology of an unfinished creation.

When the destined hero spawns in, it is not necessarily a happy occasion. Born at the nexus of everyone's negative thoughts, the destined hero appears almost precisely at unhappy moments. Nobody knows for sure that the Angel people say commands the hero from beyond will be a merciful being. The only thing guaranteed is that a generic being thrown together from off-the-shelf parts is going to come solve people's problems one way or another and make them go away, whether or not that method is particularly gentle or nice. So all in all, Chara appearing can very easily be less an occasion of hope than an event of great dread.

Chara was the original form of Kris. As they appear in the background stories of Undertale, Chara was the vessel spawned by the universe to hold the Angel. Whether the Angel was truly good or bad, Chara would have been generated. And they would have proceeded down the path laid down in front of them by whatever shared moments of darkness and desire for a prophecy and belief in prophecies that everyone converged onto. In some senses, it was inevitable that would happen one day, and it was only a matter of time before Chara would be created. In another sense, it wasn't inevitable Chara had to be Chara. In the absence of any other people but the Angel, the darkness beneath the world of Deltarune would capture the destined hero and lock them in a tight cage of game mechanics — one cage of red heart-shaped Protector and game systems around human child, one cage of human parts around red heart-shaped object. The natural, free-floating world of Deltarune inhabited by humans and the stuff of soft science-fiction would be fully, suddenly, and horrifyingly transmogrified into a console role-playing game.

But there is one interesting quirk of spawning a destined hero exactly at the moment no one has hope. Were someone who felt darkness rising inside them to turn around and strike back hard enough to hit it out of the field, the creation process would have to stop, and everyone would be free. This is what Dess did. Beginning to feel a deep void inside that could turn the entire landscape of a person's mind malignant, Dess pushed away the Titan and headed into Furtherville where it just happened to be the destined hero had been dropped. No one would tell Dess how to live life or how far he could take himself, because on this day he was a new man.

The world of Undertale was an imagined world ultimately generated by Kris. This is not to say it wasn't "real". Any Dark Fountain opened in the world of Deltarune could give the stories behind objects and memories reality. But when people hold thoughts and memories inside and shove them far down enough, the neat net of perceptions and experiences people enclose inside them as mental reality begins to break. This could only become worse in the world of Deltarune, where consciousness itself formed one great connecting darkness. The Dark Worlds, serving as the actual animating force and consciousness of Lightners, could only take so much strain and punishment. When an experience threatening to a Dark World is pushed far below it, it becomes a Titan. But when something is pushed far down enough, it will simply pierce through the Deltarune cosmos and break through to the other side. As Kris pushed their early memories further and further away from them, and covered them under the mystery man, and covered that under a whimsical unseen figure behind a tree, W.D. Gaster emerged as a kind of personification of the vessel- and prophecy-generation process and the universal connecting darkness around it. He was always there in a sense. But as Kris encouraged him to take on a particular form, he generated a world around him which would become the Undertale world or Underground, and took his place in the center as its sharpest mind. The Undertale world formed as a kind of idealized version of Hometown, where everything was a little more impressive and mythical, the perfect place to escape to. Gaster then disappeared from the Undertale world, and moved to the darkness below the Deltarune world to become its "narrator". Having the power to animate static ideas into living things, he placed the Core at the center of the Underground and the conceit of human and monster "Souls" inside its residents, and he placed one of these same red heart-shaped objects inside Kris, the same one the connecting darkness would have put there anyway had the character creation process successfully completed.

Thus, the so-called "human Soul" presented in Undertale is not a natural organ, nor the thing that actually enables personality, empathy, and feelings. It is more of an artificial device whose only function is to permit static objects to experience life. Within Deltarune, the red Soul device symbolizes Kris believing they can't continue to exist without a grand narrator setting forth a Prophecy of exactly how they can get through all the hard emotional stuff without trying. On one hand, Kris comes to the realization they have to get rid of this thing, this knot of bad coping mechanisms that is keeping them from actually solving their problems, but on the other, there's little else keeping them alive, so they fear the awful possibility that there really is no way to make it through all this correctly, and maybe giving in and dying and not bothering anyone any more really is the only mature decision.

There are normally no heart-shaped objects in Deltarune. Monsters and humans simply have biological hearts and lungs. When Kris threw themself into the abyss to attempt to leave the Deltarune world, the Dark World inside them actually giving them sentience was sacrificed to create the Underground and the Core. However, having been created in his current form to protect Kris, Gaster made use of the ability to rewind timelines to quickly catch Kris in the middle of their descent and insert into them the "Protector". One version of Kris plummeted into the darkness and was absorbed. The other version successfully made it out of the pit thanks to Sans — the version that would grow into a teenager and struggle with the terrible contradiction of how to fully come back to life after dying without removing their last ties to life entirely. As the Soul merged with Kris at the joining of the two spacetimes, the fuzzy event horizon created by desynchronizing the Undertale and Deltarune timelines collapsed. The sheer collision of two objects into a consistent one-way process overcame the long gap of relativity and turned into a quantum interaction, allowing the separate histories of the two timelines to continue forward consistently, one red heart device on each timeline. As all actual physics students know, human observers and measuring devices having unique power to create new plural realities is a misconception. It is not our choices that matter, but our actions.

Kris, Chara, was a simple created tool. An instantiated object. Had they come into being with only the Angel, or "Gaster", the universal darkness before everything, they would never have had the chance to become a living thing. By encountering Dess, by being born into the world and having a chance to grow through forming bonds to other living beings, to experiment and overcome their awkward unfinished bits on their own, they gained the pulse of life. To a normal resident of the Deltarune world, social connection is what shapes people's personalities and identities, and caring for someone else is all it takes to be a hero; all it really takes to be a hero is to be Sans.

With Dess gone, Kris began to return to a world of emptiness and nobody and started to feel the concepts of love and socialization disintegrate. Their outer shell of experience and personality seemed to drain and become gray. Because a game character is nothing more than a bunch of pixels, numbers, and ontological statements. A game can contain dialogue, history, quests, and even try to tell you its characters have "Souls", but not even a drawn heart-shaped object stuck on a screen by some weird mystery man can itself make those characters feel or live.

Thus Chara would fall into Undertale, forget everything they had been, become a vessel of the narrative, and blend into the Underground as a destructive force. If they weren't powerful, the monsters on the other side of darkness still had the power to fire the engine of self-destruction. If the Lightners far on the other side ever gave in to their crushing secrets and ceased to be able to heal their minds, the Underground would burst out and consume the Deltarune world, issuing out shapes that looked nothing like monsters or armies but instead distorted Knights and Titans — covering the Deltarune cosmos in the ideal Undertale world only after a cataclysmic tragedy.

The story of Undertale goes like this: inside Undertale, Chara would attempt to push the monsters into a war to destroy the surface. Forcing the alternate version of their brother Asriel to absorb the Protector that Gaster had marked them with as a matter of course for anything entering his world, they got the monster prince through the Barrier carrying their body. But Asriel did not look like Asriel on the surface, and looked something more like the Roaring Knight. The people of the Undertale world experienced the surface world as fantastical and the people of the surface world experienced the Undertale world as something horrifying. Asriel returned, dying, but to his last moment suffering much deeper with the question of why he had to lose his sibling. Kris might vanish from all their problems in the Deltarune world, but nobody would get to escape the curse of feeling like the one person who anchored and created their world had been replaced with a gaping void. (The Memoryheads would be there to haunt anyone overly sure they had.) Then Asriel would get turned into a flower, and Flowey would take over the ability to save, and lock Gaster out of rewriting the timeline fully. And that's where Undertale's main story begins.

Little did Kris know, they were simply missing the wrong thing. It wasn't the lost girl that would be coming back.

Deltarune chapter 1

It all started when Susie showed up.

Tired, apathetic, slammed into the wall, and fighting to breathe, the jagged jaws closed in and they were about to meet their maker.

And Kris? They didn't really mind it, because compared to the rest of their week this was the least boring day they'd had. Susie had to let their odd, off-balance body flop to the floor again, because she simply couldn't get any reaction out of them. Again, after the day she threatened to bite Kris' head like an apple. Kris only laughed at her. Susie had never experienced plummeting into a pit at the edge of the universe in order to die only to be forcibly reanimated by a lazy skeleton man and a needlessly complex quantum relativity process, and it showed.

Their teacher would end up sending them to retrieve a box of chalk in the school supply closet. It seemed like things were looking up. But then, out of the corner of their eye, Kris glimpsed a black shadow.

Was that...? No. No no no. That thing wasn't real. A shadow had appeared a day ago, but this wasn't the real one, was it? This had to be a hallucination. It had to be from all the stresses of Noelle, and her mother, and the real one. From the secrets, from the fears of this new thing, from not sleeping right. It was definitely possible to see fake images of a real thing. But... images of a thing couldn't become real. There was no way this thing could jump wildly across space and start opening portals wherever somebody hallucinated it. Was there?

Before they could figure out the answer to the question, the angular shadow had closed the door and let the two teenagers plummet into darkness.

[unfinished]

Deltarune chapter 2

[unfinished]

Deltarune chapter 3

[unfinished]

Deltarune chapter 4

[unfinished]

Asgore

[Note: This is my interpretation of Deltarune chapter 5, which does not yet exist.]

they go into the Dark World for most of the main plot of the area Asgore isn't there, and it's just Kris, Susie, and Ralsei investigating the place and learning about the relationship between Kris and their father

this is a place to be alone with his flowers the inferno isn't his. dark worlds are made out of psychological impressions and memories. Toriel lit the inferno, turning Asgore's peaceful flower field into a barren wasteland.

echo flowers terrifying dead plant stalks wheezing out lines from past arguments

at the same time, the edge of a forest is slowly growing back a great pine tree is bravely holding on through the fire.

asgore's corkboard turned into Darkners. this dark world has a whole detective agency staffed by things like flowers and spades. there is a whole gag of the flower detectives diving "underground" to be sneaky or infiltrate places. the flower characters going underground and popping up somewhere else is the _only_ thing about Flowey from Undertale that makes it into this Dark World.

there is a great big monument to the Dark Shard. the Darkners are apparently treating this like a huge breakthrough and a great discovery.

the place is something of a maze, going on and on either way and across itself and in circles.

it becomes apparent very quickly when exploring this Dark World that Asgore created more and more of this thing in the process of trying to investigate it. though one would think he could have realized this eventually, it wasn't entirely his fault; Carol had wildly miscalculated on the way that Dark Worlds work and hadn't really given him the right instructions.

[unfinished]

The pit

as the three heroes reach the end of the Dark World, the Roaring Knight appears one more ominous time. and this time they do something truly sneaky. they create a second yawning pit inside the Dark World that doesn't look like a Dark Fountain, so Kris and Susie have no choice but to investigate it. what they don't know is this pit is the Titan.

a Titan is not much more than someone's most repressed thoughts or most terrifying memory that could crush their psychology if it came to the surface. so, the Titan is now taking the form of the first few cracks of the Roaring -- the pointed tail.

[Kris backs away from the pit.] Susie: Hey, what's wrong? This is just... a hole. Susie: We've fought worse things than this before. Susie: Kris? Ralsei: ...Well. I don't blame them. Ralsei: You see, I can't go into that hole either. That's the Roaring. Ralsei: Do you remember what the Prophecy said? When the Roaring comes to pass, that "hole" rips through Dark Worlds and drains the color out of Darkners. There will actually be nothing left of any of the Dark Worlds when it gets all the way through. Susie: [serious] You are saying that much too cheerfully. [While the two have been bouncing off each other, Kris simply turns around and tries to walk away.] Susie: Kris...?!

At this point the Angel can actually turn Kris around and willingly let them run away. Susie and Ralsei run after them. The Knight taunts them by hurling a bunch of void daggers. Before long, Susie and Ralsei catch up with Kris, and it becomes a strange game of everyone following Kris to who knows where. Susie: ...So where are we even going?

Soon enough, Kris slows to a halt. Up ahead, we can see that Noelle has been in the fountain and has just caught up to the two of them. Kris continues to her with no delay and awkwardly hugs her, just seizing her and pressing her into them. This is not easy to confuse for romance. Kris was clearly terrified and seems relieved Noelle is here.

[As Kris lets go of Noelle they simply gaze at her a second, apparently choking out a "thank you".] Noelle: [concerned] Kris. Noelle: It was nothing. Noelle: [worried, glancing away] I was just afraid of, if you're going to be down here, what was going to happen to you. Noelle: [looking at them] The world is falling apart. Noelle: And if it's that bad out there... what's going on on the inside? [Reassured, Kris gently takes Noelle's wrist. Noelle has a heartened smile. The two of them glance over at the great shadowy rift, which the Knight is still silently hovering over. Looming.] Susie: [good-natured] Hey, you can't just claim Noelle for yourself. [As she says this Susie walks over to the other side of them and puts her arm around Noelle, gentle with her but holding her close. Ralsei, who had mostly just been standing to the side smiling, moves to where Susie was.] Susie: Well, are we ready to go down there? [Susie lets go of Noelle and takes a couple steps back out into the Dark World landscape to stand in the direction of the looming Knight.] Susie: [unseriously] Any last words?

[If this is a game, a dialogue box pops up for Kris to finally have the chance to let out part of what they've been so afraid of... or not.] ☐ You'll find her dead body ☐ That isn't Dess ☐ Into the pit

[Option 1] Kris: (You'll find her dead body) [Noelle looks anxious for a moment, not saying anything.] Noelle: I always knew there was a chance of that. Susie: [teasing] Kris, I tried to tell you that monsters collapse into dust. [*gb] Noelle: No, they're being poetic. When they were smaller they wouldn't stop talking about skeletons. Noelle: You know, dead ones. It was always, ooo you'll find them and they'll be a skeleton! Noelle: I think they saw one too many heavy metal albums. Susie: Kris... why would you think that lamps had skeletons?? [Kris looks embarrassed, but just normally, not in any sense of looking outright ashamed and afraid of Susie or Noelle this time.] Noelle: [compassionate] Kris, it's okay. Noelle: I want you here no matter how many weird metaphors you put in everything. Noelle: And. Um. Noelle: If we go in there and there's just a bunch of dust on the floor, I'll be able to accept that too. Susie: All right then. Susie: It can't be worse than when we went in and found the old man. Maybe she'll be a cool statue for all we know.

[Option 2] Kris: (That isn't Dess) Noelle: What... What do you mean by that? [Kris mumbles something looking away from the two of them] Noelle: "You don't want to know." Noelle: [anxious] _What_ don't I want to know? Noelle: Kris. If there's something you've been keeping from me about what this thing is, you need to tell me. Susie: The Knight is a sandwich. Susie: It's a very bad sandwich that Kris accidentally dropped behind the couch and left there for three weeks and by the time they cleaned it up the couch stank and they couldn't wash away the stain and were forever afraid the world would catch onto their crimes. Noelle: [disconcerted] Really. Susie: That's why it has daggers. You know, on a sandwich— [Kris quietly admits a bit more] Susie: The daggers are for piercing through your hand? Susie: What does that even mean? [Kris uses their hands to show the Roaring Knight's blade wisping up out of the portal in their other hand, and then clasps their hand into a fist as if to hold a dagger and slams their fist hard into their palm. Noelle jumps.] Susie: That looks... painful. Susie: I wonder if. Do you think you could create a Dark Fountain into yourself? Noelle: [lost] While we're already in here? Susie: Well. At all. But I guess in here too. Ralsei: It would only lead to the Roaring. What's in your mind is no different from what's in the Dark Worlds. Ralsei: And what's inside all Dark Worlds is the Titans. Ralsei: The Titan Fountain would fill your entire being. Susie: The _Titan_ Fountain? Ralsei: It's best we just go in. It'll make sense to you once you see it.

[Option 3] Kris: (Into the pit) Susie: All right then. Susie: Noelle? Noelle: [hopeful] We're going to find her. Noelle: As they say, where there's rain, there's a cloud. Noelle: And where there's a Roaring Knight, there's...... something.

Kris opens the spellbook they found in the burning flower field Dark World and allows Ralsei to dissolve into a bunch of sparkles that fly into the book, snapping it shut as if to press him for later and stowing it, through unknown means, beneath their cloak. This is just a colorful way of representing the inventory space that isn't exactly anywhere. With Ralsei safely registered into Kris' inventory, he is not going to get shredded entering the pit. Kris, Susie, and Noelle head off toward the horizon where the Knight and the pit wait for them.

If, at the moment Kris turns away from the pit, the Angel does not let Kris run, Kris faces the pit, takes a very deep breath, right now clearly in a state only a couple rungs above a panic attack, and abruptly catapults their body into the void fast enough Susie and Ralsei can only follow with their eyes before the pit contracts into nothing. The Knight has locked them in. Susie jumps forward onto regular burnt earth. Ralsei looks very distressed. The Knight is nowhere to be seen. Chapter 6 will begin with only Kris.

Gaster

When Kris falls into the void, they enter a new kind of landscape. Everything is rendered differently here from the way it is in the Dark Worlds. Major characters are shown in their Light World form. Darkners, at the moment they exist, are either rendered in stark pitch-black darkness with white outlines, or in the case they ever had associated colors, as black-and-white figures plus about a third of their original color swatches inverted, with hatching or patterning if necessary. (For example, Ralsei would be drawn in black and white with a nice light-cherry or hibiscus red.)

The place itself is mostly covered in dark and there is not a whole lot down here. One of the most notable features is a canopy of what look like jagged glass shards all packed around particular "corridors" like angled pillars. Even so, it's impossible to see any kind of sky as much as some kind of viscous, cloudy background blackness. Heading down the corridors you can see a number of darkness fetuses bubbling up from the bottom to the top layer of froth, and what look like some kind of discarded shells of the Roaring Knight. Some of them look very crushed and beat up, while others look more untouched.

Together

Kris, Susie, and Noelle head through the corridors to reach a single isolated room that looks like a floating box, bearing a name plate on its door identifying it as the office of "D…r Holiday", with the letters wildly run together so that it looks about two letters long.

Noelle: [stunned] Deserebebmer Holiday. [excited] We're here! Susie: [smirks] Well I'm glad you could read it. [Kris takes a step back, hestitating just long enough to let the other two go in first.]

When the two girls enter the room, they find some kind of researcher figure patiently awaiting them in a swivel chair, gazing into them distantly, gazing through them. The office chair looks like one of those slightly overdone black leather ones, strangely imposing, probably comfortable. The man himself is almost less notable than the chair. He is a deer monster a lot like Noelle. All of his features are rendered in shadow, in the inverted Titanspawn palette. He has a long black leather jacket with a collar and a turtleneck of unclear color which also looks black. He has a short, slightly unkempt beard and he looks like he doesn't sleep enough. His voice is not especially remarkable, but if this is a game his typer beep is warped and tin-sounding.

[The shadowed deer man stands up.] D…r: [fateful] Well. You're finally here. Noelle: [surprised] I--... wow. Should I introduce myself? D…r: [tired] Not you. [staring through them at Kris] _them_. Dess: [casually, without looking at Noelle] I know who _you_ are. Dess: [ominous] But the real question is if you know who _they_ are. [Noelle and Susie glance at Kris a little concerned] Dess: Do you know what this child did? [Noelle is increasingly anxious] Susie: Oh, come on. Kris never did anything that bad. Dess: I doubt Kris would agree with you. [Kris peers out from behind Susie defensively.] Dess: Isn't that right, Kris. [creepy, face seeming to tower] You have someone to answer to. [There is a "lightning-strike" moment where the shadowed deer man flashes into literally just Gaster, but only for less than a second. A strange skeleton monster with a coat forged from darkness who looks related to Sans but also like he is somehow a being beyond comprehension with terrifying powers.] [Noelle bunches up for a moment. Susie focuses on the anomaly either surprised or intrigued but mostly unmoved.] [Kris, still hesitating a little bit, steps out from behind Susie to face the shadowed deer man. Noelle has relaxed but still looks concerned.] Dess: Good. So you finally admit it. Dess: That you broke your promise. Susie: Can we cut it with the ominous bullcrap and you just tell us what Kris even did? Dess: I was about to, if you hadn't interrupted me. Susie: ...Fine.

[flashback sequence where Dess is normal] Dess: When the two of us were younger, I met Kris way over in the next city. [panel of Kris slinking around city and Dess stepping out from bushes] Dess: Your friend spawned from the deepest sludges of destiny. [symbolic scene of Kris mysteriously spawning out of some sort of dark wave crest rising from the earth with two halves of character creation screen falling to either side] Dess: It didn't matter. I determined I would do anything to protect them. [panel of Dess and Kris returned to Holiday house] Dess: I asked nothing from Kris. [panel of Dess showing Kris how to play the too-big guitar] Dess: Except I did tell them one thing. Dess: "Don't forget" [oddly ominous panel of Kris standing in silhouette with stylized phrase of notes from song above them, as if they are being taunted with the reminder of this lyric]

[back to the overworld view of Dess just to take a loaded, ominous break] Dess: I think you can guess what they did. [visualization sequence continues] Dess: At every moment the world got tough, they turned away. [panel of Kris doodling and looking kind of generally dissatisfied, background showing a covering-things-up tree] Dess: From their friends, from their family members, from everybody. [back to the three and Dess] Dess: Kris, I have no ill will toward you. Dess: But at this point I am very busy and you'll simply have to go home. [beat] Dess: Kris would abandon any of you. You do realize that. [Kris looks really done with this, clenching their fists.]

Noelle: Well. I don't know what they were like back then but I think they're better now. Susie: Yeah. Kris has never let us down. Dess: You think that. You believe that now. [burbles and churns to become Gaster] BUT YOU HAVE ALL SEEN THE PROPHECY. [churns back through an especially nightmarish Roaring Knight, then back to Dess] Dess: Now head on home. If I can complete my plan, you only have to banish the Angel's Heaven and forget about me. [Kris turns their back, preparing to leave.]

Noelle: But...... you're my brother. I can't just leave you here. Noelle: I never forgot about you for a moment. I always kept looking. Dess: Unlike Kris? [Noelle quickly turns regretful about saying that. Kris takes a couple steps away.] Dess: [smiles] No, I really appreciate that you tried. Even if it was never going to get through. Dess: But I've changed too much, and learned too much. Dess: I belong here now. [Noelle looks a bit sad, but knows there's not much she can do, and follows Kris and Susie out of the room and through the corridor.]

Susie: What is wrong with him?? Susie: I can't imagine judging either of us for anything that happened that long ago. Susie: And why does he keep... changing like that? Noelle: I... don't know. Noelle: Maybe something down here could be a clue. Noelle: These places do seem to be our minds after all?

Before and after finding the Dess room, Kris' party has the ability to wander around the messed-up Titan fountain. This place does indeed have a lot of environmental storytelling objects. It's something like the "black space", cluster-of-freaky-puzzle-rooms-around-the-distorted-queen (OFF), or Yume Nikki rooms of Deltarune, although it's more on the chill side versus any of those things.

Down here, regular untransformed objects tend to turn up on pedestals as long as someone in the Titan World has a strong memory of them. They're only memories of the real objects, and they might be rendered in the black-and-white Titan palette if the sprites were legible that way. Either way they are just kind of there on these very abstract tiny columns a little like spurts of water or stalactites. When you inspect them they turn into encounters with ordinary flipped-palette Darkners. These are more or less like pre-Chapter-5 opponents, aside from the fact some of them stay inanimate objects the whole time, they are more moody than usual, and they will run away when you choose your Acts badly. Fighting them doesn't necessarily count as a "bad choice", depending on the item. If you fail to Spare them they distort into tiny Titan children that look very vaguely like the Knight and wisp away out the top of the screen. If you Spare them correctly you will see the continuously bubbling baby Titan vents around them shut off. At the same time, given these encounters are more difficult and less intuitive, whenever you leave one of the major map-divisions of this Titan world without Sparing all the pedestal Darkners all the pedestals in that area reset so you have a chance to try them all again.

One of the items is the guitar from back in Dess' Light World room, which has turned into some kind of security guard. If you "Harmonize", or if you "Secret", it can be Spared. It isn't a difficult one. Susie: Is secret really a verb? Ralsei, popping out of spellbook in inverted palette: Yes, it means to stow something. Susie: Huh.

There are also a number of other pedestals with guitars on them, all shaped into some very artistic designs from various unimportant pieces of debris. They will click up into encounters which are eerily still with nothing really happening and not much on the screen where you can click and they will apparently play themselves. There is no particular point to this except that the presentation of all of it is unnecessarily eerie. None of the characters have any dialogue, it's just Kris and the guitar and utter silence and then a tune, and then the encounter ends. Although... there is just one guitar that if you manage to find and play Kris will get very unnerved. This is the accursed fractionally-tuned guitar that played Gaster's theme as if was a chord arpeggio, hitting _some_ kind of chord in the middle. Going back to the overworld Kris turns away from the guitar and everyone and shifts uncomfortably. Susie and Noelle are confused, apparently having no idea what this song is. But it seems Kris doesn't want to tell them.

One of the items is a shadow of the red Soul device. When encountered this turns into an imaginary projection of what really looks like Chara, complete with knife. It says the line "I am the shadow... the true self", literally referencing the _Persona_ series. If you "Discard" this character, or "Shadowbox" them, that's wrong. If you "Overshadow" them, they can be Spared.

One of the items is a pedestal with a journal on it. It appears to be a series of observations about the Dark Worlds and the Titan World, which the closer you look at them seem to just be another version of the Prophecy. This item appears multiple times, sometimes simply being a readable book with different sections and sometimes turning into a sort of fancy mosaic wyvern made of stained-glass window sections, named "Trihard". If you "Follow" it, this is wrong. If you "Read" it, it can be Spared. This character has a funny little encounter puzzle where when you "Read" it you have to make a couple moves to solve a tangram. It isn't overly difficult.

One of the items is an egg. This appears if Kris collected any one of the hidden eggs. It will turn into a talking forgotten-man tree, because a lot of things down here just aren't logical any more. You are not supposed to "Water" the tree. If you "Uproot" the tree, or you attack the tree to 0 HP and it slices in two — on the last hit it abruptly breaks before you can even use Pacify — it will be Spared. This encounter is totally optional, but is an important hint, explaining why the eggs are "not too important" but "not too unimportant". The eggs are just lore.

One of the items is a Shadow Crystal, which appears if Kris collected at least one in the previous chapters. There are thousands and thousands of Shadow Crystals down here of various sizes, but this small one is here to explicitly remind you they're still important. In an encounter the Shadow Crystal transforms into a looming dagger with an eye on it, very similar to the ones the Knight throws sometimes. The eye blinks sometimes, showing that for whatever reason this thing truly did turn into a Darkner. If you "See", you'll be cursed with a particularly nasty avalanche of daggers to dodge, although nothing else bad happens. If you "Overlook", the Darkner turns into a Titan child. If you "Accessorize", the Pacify meter increases _and_ you get the nasty dagger pattern. Kris can't actually do any actions that increase the Spare meter. The least difficult strategy is to let Kris defend and have Noelle "Unsheath", which does increase the Spare meter. But clicking "Accessorize" and watching Kris wear the giant dagger-thing across their back is awfully funny.

These are some of the most important items. A lot of the items are just slightly more ordinary things like a pencil, a green scarf, a stack of green crayons, the very cursed burnt pizza box that turns into "Nightmare" again, a Pipis, and a rotating red gem that leaves Susie baffled (it's a reference to the "caskets" room in Petscop). A couple of these would be appearing here specifically to have the Noelle blog anecdotes appear in the game.

When you find the red gem, Noelle claims she remembers it. It was hidden somewhere in the dark corners of her house, and it was one of those things that as a child she was a bit afraid was going to kill her. It turns into a spinning battle robot with blades on all sides. The wrong action for it is "Spiral". The right action is "Appraise".

[unfinished]

Footnotes

=> (pronounced entry link)

deltashard1 RedactedTale/ basic concept

<< (pronounced earlier revision)

pointed-tail-1 fitting REDACTEDtale into Deltarune chapter 4 (scrap / first version of this entry)

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2025-10-24T16:39:11H

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2972_pointed-tail2

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REDACTEDtale/ narrative of how Dess disappeared, based on "bad-memory" theory